The article goes on to skewer the year of Linux thing that seems to show up on pretty much every tech news site throughout December and January as lazy editors round out their year with softball trolling stories and "Year End Lists." We should compile a year-end list about this:)

Taco whinging about lazy editors... there's a hypocrite for you. Is the difference between Slashdot and all those "other" tech news sites the fact that Slasdot editors are lazy year-round? How about getting your own house in order pal!

Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat... The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39.

Sounds like you already had a nut - the one building the tree. I'm guessing you either:

Do what they do for gasoline pumps - put it up high on one side, and get a long enough cord to connect it. If you want maximum flexibility, why not connect it to the ceiling above the center of the car (maybe with a small boom to assist with cable management)? That will keep it out of your way while walking around the vehicle, yet still make it visually obvious whenever it is plugged in.

hotdiggitydawg writes: Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you have all been waiting for has finally arrived. Although this is being branded a "reorganisation", have we now finally seen the back of this whole sordid affair?

mdsolar writes: "The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that an Arizona company, Global Research Technologies has announce the building of Klaus Lackner's carbon capture tower. The sorbent is apparently not lye but a proprietary process. DOE has been looking at CO2 capture from flu gas but this is capture directly from the atmosphere.
Direct capture is putting the genie back in the bottle if it can be done more efficiently than plants do it. At 3 meters tall and pulling 18 kg
of CO2 a year, this does not sound like a replacement for the good old tree yet but perhaps they'll improve."

An anonymous reader writes: Dr Hallinan said:
"It looks like brown dwarfs are the missing step between the radio emissions we see generated at Jupiter and those we observe from pulsars".
From the article:
"A class of "failed" star called a brown dwarf emits beams of radiation that are thousands of times brighter than any released by the Sun.
The brown dwarfs are behaving like an altogether different and exotic cosmic object called a pulsar."
Brown dwarfs are stellar also-rans which lack the necessary mass to kick-start nuclear fusion reactions in their cores.
Greg Hallinan from the National University of Ireland in Galway and his colleagues used the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico to observe a very cool, rapidly rotating brown dwarf called TVLM 513-46546."
A bright flash from the brown dwarf was observed roughly every two hours, and are very similar to those observed from pulsars. But this whole system is on a much slower and smaller scale, so it is easier for astronomers to decipher what is going on.
For some time, scientists have wondered if there were similarities between this type of emission and the periodic radio beams from pulsars. Observations of TVLM 513-46546 could provide the first direct evidence for such a link.

SawyerLX writes: Tux gets ready to be placed on the nose of an Indy 500 car. The sponsorship is being done by some community donations at Tux500.com
If all goes well, within the next month, the mascot will be placed on the sides of the cars with a big "LINUX".
Could be worth it to see a TEAM LINUX car going around and around and around while shouting "GO LINUX!! GO!" on raceday. Either way, It would be nice to see a sponsor on a racing car that isn't commonly being shoved down ones throat.

dominique_cimafranca writes: "News flash: Bill Gates heckled in China. According to Local6, Gates had just finished a speech at Peking University and was handing out prizes to students when a Chinese man walked on stage and unveiled a banner with "free software, open source" written on it."